In this post, I’ll take a crack at summarizing a lengthy salvo against Trinity monotheism launched by Daniel Howard-Snyder. Dan is well known and respected for his work on the problem of evil and in theory of knowledge. He has a hard-hitting and thorough style, very Alstonian (which is no accident). Generally, Dan is a nice guy, with a good sense of humor to boot. But reportedly this picture was taken of him in his office when he was working on this article.
“Trinity Monotheism” (Philosophia Christi 5:2, 2003, 375-403) is long and in parts technical article in which he argues that this theory is an all-around failure. I’ll do my best here to hit the highlights, dumbing down (hopefully accurately!) Dan’s technically precise language.
Dan sets out what he calls the Challenge of Polytheism. This is: If the Father and Son aren’t identical, and yet are each divine, why doesn’t it follow that there are two divinities, that is, two gods? (377) Short answer? According to Moreland and Craig, there are two ways to be “fully divine”. First, one may have the divine nature (God), and second, one may be a part of something which has the divine nature (the Father, etc.). (378-9)
Dan spends some time puzzling about how their Trinity monotheism could fit with their dualism (belief in souls, in addition to material things). Although they want to say that you and I just are certain souls (immaterial entities), no person of the Trinity is identical with any soul, and so presumably not with any entity at all. (383) This is just to say, that the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit are not things, but rather in some sense modes (my term – not Dan’s or theirs) of a thing, namely, the soul God. That’s right, they are minds, or rational faculties. And God is not, on their view, identical with any person; although it (God) is a soul in which persons or at least “consciousnesses” somehow inhere – that is, it has parts or quasi-parts which are persons. (383-4) Dan highlights other tensions with their dualism as well (383-5), but we need to move on.
Dan expresses numerous worries about their cat analogy (in the last post I put it in terms of a dog), and urges that the analogy does nothing to illustrate a truly orthodox trinitarianism, no matter how it is understood (he goes through several ways.) Basically, he doesn’t know how such an analogy can help them to avoid both polytheism and diminishing the divinity of the persons. (386-90)
He also claims that the issue of a part/whole relation is a distraction. Just the Father (etc.) being a part – or something like a part – of the Trinity is not at all what makes the Father wholly divine. Rather, they want to say that the Father is wholly divine because he is omnipotent, omniscient, omnibenevolent and so on – because he has the divine attributes. (391-2; cf. 591 of Moreland’s and Craig’s chapter) They want to say that God has these attributes precisely because one or all of the persons do. Moreover, Dan complains, their idea that there are two ways to be “fully divine” remains unclear. (392)
Yet more objections from Dan:
- By their own criteria, laid out elsewhere in their book, the persons are substances just as much as God is. (393-5) And yet, they (wanting to uphold the “Nicene” creed) deny that the persons are substances while affirming that God is.
- Their claim that God/the Trinity “supports” the three persons is unclear, and the Cerberus example seems to be not of one dog with three minds, but rather, of three dogs with overlapping bodies. (396) Again, polytheism looms. This is all perhaps clearer with human siamese twins.
Eng and Chang here are two humans, not one. Call Chang + Eng – “Twinsy”. Twinsy, if there is such a thing, ain’t a human, although it would have two human parts. (396) One might reply that there are two persons in Twinsy, but that there’s just one human being there, namely Twinsy. (397) But that seems wrong. If we separated Eng and Chang, we wouldn’t annihilate a human (Twinsy) and create two new ones from its leftovers (i.e. Eng and Chang). Rather, we would be merely separating the only two humans and persons that were there all along. (397) We don’t annhilate Twinsy, because there’s really no such thing, and certainly no such human as Twinsy. Chang and Eng’s mother, on their birthday, gave birth to exactly two (conjoined) offspring – not one or three.
- Their second analogy – God supports the persons just as “our individual beings support one person” – also doesn’t help us to understand what they mean by saying that God “supports” each of the three persons. (397-8)
- In their view, God is not a person, in the sense of being numerically identical with a certain person, even thought it (God) has parts which are persons. So they want to say, for example, that each of the three is all-knowing. And they also want to say God is all-knowing, in that he has parts which are all-knowing. But Dan objects,
…there can be no “lending” of a property [i.e. a whole “getting” a property from one of its parts] unless the borrower is antecedently the sort of thing that can have it. …[Therefore,] Unless God is antecedently the sort of thing that can act intentionally – that is, unless God is a person – God cannot borrow the property of creating the heavens and the earth from the Son. …All other [statements involving] acts attributed to God [in the Bible] will likewise turn out to be, strictly and literally, false. (399-400)
- On their view, a thing (God) can exemplify the divine nature without itself being a (identical to) a person. Nor can divinity include properties that require being a person, e.g. being all-knowing, being perfectly free. This, Dan argues, is “an abysmally low” view of the divine nature. (400) He adds,
If God is not a person or agent, then God does not know anything, cannot act, cannot choose, cannot be morally good, cannot be worthy of worship. This is the God of Moreland’s and Craig’s Trinity Monotheism.” (401)
Ouch.
- When Moreland and Craig say “there’s one God” they don’t mean what monotheists normally mean by those words.
If nothing could be a God unless the nature it exemplified included the property of being triune and lacked the property of being a person, then Christians and Jews would not be in agreement on this score [i.e. about there being one and only one god]. But they are. …[And so] Moreland and Craig offer us a version of Trinity Monotheism that is not a version of Monotheism.
These look like some tough hurdles to overcome. Can they be?
Next time: Craig fires back.
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Snyder is doing us a great service by pulling on this string. The Reformation is far from over and when you pull on this string the Trinity unravels and behind it you see Plato, not Jesus.
When Jesus rose from the grave he told Mary “I go to my God and your God” . They both had a god. Now God cannot have a God, so Jesus could not be God and have a God.
1 Cor 8:6 says it so well:
“But for us there is one God, the father.”
peace
Robert Roberg
Gainesville FL
Thanks for the replies Dale. Here are more.
On 3: By ‘life’ I meant a biological life, not a mental life. I think our grip on number of lives is better than our grip on number of events. Even if we take an event to be a thing having a property and say that the event occurs iff the thing has the property, it needn’t make the account circular. Particles compose an organism. The joint activity of the constituent particles make the life-event of the organism. So we understand the life in terms of events that involve each of the particles, not in terms of events that involve the organism. Such lives will have borderline cases. When we see what goes on in metamorphosis, we might not know whether to count the caterpillar and butterfly as one organism or two. But there are non-borderline cases. I assume in Eng and Chang’s case, we start out with two zygotes or perhaps even two embryos that partially fuse at some point. Also Peter van Inwagen and Eric Olson would say we can count human organisms by organs of maintenance, brain stems. If so, since Eng and Chang have two brain stems, they are two human organisms. If this is right, just say in Cerberus’ case, we start out with one zygote, then one embryo, and then there’s one brain stem, but three organs of thought, three cerebrums. If materialism were true, this might be all there is to say about what human persons are.
On 5: It does seem a bit ad hoc to distinguish a rational substance and person by identity-conditions. But note that this is a standard move in some circles: e.g. coincidentalists who say I’m not an organism or body, but such constitutes me, and the organism or body now has the mental properties I do, should say the organism or body is a mental subject as it has mental properties and is rational as it has the same mental properties I do and I’m rational, but it lacks the identity conditions to qualify as the object of first-person-singular reference. Also many who believe I have temporal parts and so I think now in virtue of a temporal part that exists and thinks now should say similar.
Nice work, Joseph. Thanks for your thoughts. Here are some back.
re: 3 – that “sameness of life” criterion is slippery, IMHO. A life is an event. But what makes an event one event? Same thing and property? The first seems to make it circular as a criterion of identity. In any case, I don’t see why Eng and Chang would have two lives, and Cerberus only one. If you focus on the biological, then both perhaps have one. If you throw in the mental, then it’s two and three, right?
re 4: I think this is a friendly suggestion for revision. Notice how he downplays the import of “supports”. (104) I don’t know that M&C believe in constitution…
re 5: This would require us to distinguish between a rational substance and a person. MAYBE that’d work…
Dear Dale,
I liked Howard-Snyder’s paper a lot. I thought it very clear and thorough. I’ll try to develop some replies on behalf of Moreland and Craig (M&C)
1. It’s odd to be sure if, though we are persons and souls, God is a soul but not a person and the divine Persons are persons but not souls. I think it best for M&C to say that, say, I’m not my soul but rather my soul, in virtue of having a rational faculty, constitutes me. Then if, perhaps per impossibile, my soul lost its rational faculty, it would cease to constitute me and I’d cease to be. Interestingly, Richard Swinburne is committed to a similar view because he says that we embodied persons are composites of souls and bodies but could exist without our bodies in which case our souls alone, which of course continue to be distinct from us, would constitute us.
2. I think Howard-Snyder’s right about why the divine Persons are divine: because they have divine properties (e.g. omnipotence, omniscience, omnibenevolence). M&C should say both God and the divine Persons have the divine properties: each is a divine subject of some kind. But God and the divine Persons aren’t all persons because God doesn’t have the right identity-conditions to be a Person: a subject is a person only if it has one mind and having three minds disqualifies one.
3. I agree Chang and Eng are two conjoined humans. But this is a bit unfair to M&C. Cerberus is supposed to be one dog with three dog heads. Assume materialism and so that humans and dogs are wholly material biological organisms. Plausibly, the identity-conditions of such organisms consists in sameness of life. Now it could be that there was a naturally occurring organism that had one life but three heads with brains. There’s only one substance that has mental properties here because there’s one life. Presumably, Chang and Eng each has his own life, which is why each would continue if they were separated. But Cerberus is one organism with one life.
4. I read ‘supports’ as ‘constitutes’. This is as intelligible as the concept of constitution itself. But we should make one qualification here. One composite constitutes another if there are parts that compose each. This doesn’t hold for simples, as they lack parts. I think M&C would have to take the concept of constitution as primitive if it’s to apply to simples. But the concept would be none the worse for that.
5. There could be a univocal sense of ‘monotheism’ here. M&C should say a God is any divine rational substance (but God is not a person, because he lacks the right identity-conditions to be a person, see 2 above). Then Jews and Muslims agree there’s one God in that sense. It would be open for such a one to say that God constitutes one person but God is distinct from that divine Person. But this no doubt would be a perverse view.
6. I should say that I’m trying to develop the best reply for M&C. But I can’t say I endorse any of this.
Best,
Joseph
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